the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a rant, and some other things as well. You may remember me from such posts as “Retro Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the path under the arbor looks like it’s been raked, that’s because it has. We’ve been very busy today.

The first thing that happened today, though, after my walk and the guy I live with’s breakfast, is that a book arrived. A book he’d been looking forward to reading in the coming weeks.
You should have heard what he said when he opened the package.
The book smelled of some kind of perfumey disinfectant. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but the guy I live with said it stank so badly he couldn’t hold it in his hands, and so put it in a plastic bag with some baking soda (in a spice bag), hoping the stench would disappear.
And he made a resolution to buy books locally from now on. The pandemic changed the way he bought things, but he said now it’s time to go back to the old ways.

I’ll continue this theme, but first I want to show you some plants in the garden.
The guy I live with was sad to see what had happened to this cactus. He grew it from seed about twenty-five years ago.
It’s dead. Probably killed by the rain we had last December.

There are snowdrops, of course; mostly flowering later than usual.
This is Galanthus nivalis.
This is Crocus chrysanthus ‘Snowbunting’, a month late. It was raised by E.A.Bowles and is still one of the best.
A species Iris reticulata.
One of the tuberous geraniums from Iran (yes, an Iranian geranium) is up, all over the place.
Speaking of all over the place, the guy I live with was mildly surprised to see what Corydalis glaucescens had done. Despite the fact that this is said to grow in the shade of shrubs on north-facing slopes in places like Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, it obviously does very well on this south-facing slope. It’s self-fertile, unlike some other species here.
Pretty funny, in a way, because the others in this same garden are not easy to grow at all. Not even slightly. I know because of what I hear the guy I live with say.

Well, so, anyway, the guy I live with spent a few hours cutting down more grasses and stuff, using his fancy Japanese grass sickle.
It’s carbon steel, so it takes a serious edge. (I could do a rant for the guy I live with about carbon versus stainless steel, but maybe later.) It wasn’t very expensive, but is a wonderful tool.
He opened a new box of trash bags, and I thought he was going to throw up. The ensuing language was a bit much for my tender ears.
“The world”, he said, “has gone mad. Perfumed trash bags?”

It’s bad enough, he said, that people today wear so much “fragrance” you can smell them from twenty-five feet away (our neighbors, are, of course, much, much worse in that respect); people need to be able to breathe. Breathing is pretty important.
“Why”, he asked, “are all these sickeningly strong ‘fragrances’ suddenly a thing?”
And now we have perfumed trash bags.

The smell was on his hands, and it wouldn’t wash off. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this stench clean from my hand?” he cried, standing at the sink. Eventually after several washings, I think the smell was gone.
The patio and the garden, though, reek.

Fortunately the guy I live with has an ample supply of masks.

A lot of what was cleaned up today went into the trash bag rather than the compost pile.
We could smell the trash bag even when it was out in the garden. The guy I live with said that if Sartre were writing Nausea today, it would have been about existential trash bags.
The guy I live with might give the rest of the bags to a neighbor who doesn’t mind the smell, if someone like that actually exists.

We purebred border collies, I hasten to add, almost always smell fresh and clean.

And that, dear friends, is my partially-ranting post for today.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to bring you a gloomy post. You maybe remember me from such gloom-related posts as “Sunless Spring”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
If the garden looks a little different, that’s because it is. We spent most of the day before yesterday cutting down all the dead grasses and stuff. Well not all of them, but most of them. (I say “we” because I supervised.)
The garden really smelled bad, with all the rotting grasses trapped under the snow, and suddenly exposed to air.

There are still snowdrops. The guy I live with thinks he didn’t plant this one.
There are a lot more than just this one, but it looked kind of sad, all by itself.

The weather forecast calling for “freezing drizzle” or a “wintry mix” (the guy I live with said “The kind of weather they have in Toronto”) but of course nothing like that happened. It didn’t even snow. It was just cold, dry, and overcast.
If that sounds icky, it’s because it is.

This patch of snow has been here since before Christmas.
The guy I live with said “Maybe it’s always been there, and we never noticed.”

Here’s a view from the upstairs bedroom window.
Total gloom.
In case you’re wondering, this constant cold and gloom isn’t normal at all, for us.
https://red.msudenver.edu/2018/the-truth-about-winter-in-denver/
Reading this now makes the guy I live with pretty disgusted.

So we had Opera Day again today, because of the gloom, and the guy I live with was feeling lonely, the way he does, but today it was worse.
Some work was done, despite this. He fiddled with the flats upstairs, some. You can see one empty flat on the right of the middle flat.
There’s a dishpan full of pots, with his homemade soil-less mix.
These are for more seeds to be nicked and soaked. In this case, Ipomoea leptophylla. The pots will go into the empty flat after the seeds have germinated.

He sowed seeds of another “ip” plant, Ipomopsis longiflora, into the sandpile today, even despite all the gloom.

That’s basically it for today. I’ll leave with with a series of totally gloomy pictures from my evening walk. The guy I live with said it should have been misty or drizzling (regular drizzle, not freezing drizzle) for the complete effect, but no, it was just chilly, and super gloomy, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Until next time, then.